Miscellaneous-political

Thank you very much for your help with those ugly acronyms – and special thanks to Mary for not having heard of them. Like some of you, I was puzzled by SCOTUS – surely not a reference to the medieval philosopher from Duns? And grateful to Stash Haus for nailing it.

You’re probably right about two-syllable words, Tamar – but two unfamiliar syllables in place of three very familiar ones? Your rule, also, would exclude the possibility of referring to Hillary as the SOSOTUS, which I rather fancy. Three syllables for six, a real saving.

Our wee-small-hours radio, tuned to Five Live, is on my husband’s side of the bed. He had it on for Romney’s speech which we got the full flavour of, and for Clinton which I, on my side, slept through almost all of, but alas! we both slept so well last night that it wasn’t even turned on for Obama.

Archie phoned from school yesterday. A brief, uninformative conversation which he terminated by saying he had to change after rugby. Helen said in an email last night that reports of the first week have been mixed. She wasn’t specific. His first exeat – home leave for a long weekend – is in only a fortnight. She will be coming over, and we all hope to go to Strathardle. She is sure she will know as soon as she sees him, how things are going overall. He has culture shock to deal with, as well as all the other problems of living away from home under a radically new discipline.

Knitting

I’m not quite finished with those double mitres – the picture will have to wait until tomorrow.

All went very smoothly. I was alarmed at a passage in the instructions which said to knit 20 stitches in one direction, and then turn and knit 21 in the other, for 18 successive rows. But of course it works fine, when you stop to think about it. “R” means a ridge – two rows; we’re talking about garter stitch – and “r” means a row. I was a wee bit afraid that the instruction-writers might have got confused there. But of course they didn’t.

The wide garter stitch band goes up the front, turns right at the neck to go across the top, and then turns left for the shoulder piece along the neck edge. The second of those mitres, the left turn, starts before the first one is completed. It’s a very clever piece of engineering, at least to my simple mind.

Moth damage, I am afraid, is bad. I wound the second skein last night, hoping that I had hit upon a dud skein for the first one. Not so, alas. This one is even worse. This is the yarn, you may remember, which I found infested a few months ago. I froze it for a few days, and then, on your suggestion, roasted it for a while, and it has been in a ziplock bag ever since. I’m pretty sure the damage was at least arrested.

I think I’ll be all right in the end, after a distressing amount of joining-in. My own fault.